In a vitriolic 10.1 piece about the government shutdown, Esquire‘s Charles P. Pierce states that “the first and most important thing is to recognize how we came to this pass. Both sides did not do this. Both sides are not to blame. We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.” We did this? The Midwestern and Southern dumbshits who elected Tea Party wackos to the House of Representatives did this. The people who don’t know that the Affordable Care Act and Obamacare are one and the same did this. Rural ignorance did this.

“This is what [the wackos] came to Washington to do — to break the government of the United States,” Pierce contends. “It doesn’t matter any more whether they’re doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies [who] back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party’s mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately.

“The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan‘s First Inaugural Address in which government ‘was’ the problem, through Bill Clinton‘s ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being ‘over,’ through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find “common ground” and a ‘Third Way.’

“Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country’s higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.”

The worse things get, the more sensible my “put these people in green reeducation camps” idea sounds. It really is a benevolent idea at heart — to try and gently detoxify people who’ve become so resigned to intellectual sloth and polluted with corporate cancer food that they’re unable to embrace or flat-out opposed to any kind of healthy aesthetic in their bodies or minds, and have to come to prefer junk-food homilies and rugged-American-individualist slogans as a way of life.

I explained it all in a four year-old piece called “Argument Over Beers.”

I wrote the following about a year ago: “I don’t want to know, much salute or embrace, a little less than half of the people in this country. The US of A is admired for its movies and music and wide-open landscapes and its great cities, but it’s also widely mocked and in many cases despised by millions worldwide for the bass-ackward, climate-change-denying attitudes that are largely due to American yokelism (religious, rightwing, racist, gay-hating, NASCAR, country music, etc.) and all the Tea Party nutters and conservative corporate toadies they’ve voted into office, particularly the House of Representatives.

“A significant portion of this country has devolved into over-the-cliff lunacy and fact denial over the last decade, particularly since Obama’s election. They’re little more but stoppers and foot-draggers with unhealthy eating habits. They’re nice people when you visit (I had a really great time in Shreveport when I visited in late 2010) but later with the shitkicker music and pickup trucks and muscle cars and conservative flag-waving and all that other stuff.”